Most of us are quietly waiting for our life’s problems to subside. We feel that after “solving” them, everything will be perfect, and we’ll achieve complete happiness.
In actuality, learning to live in the problems that come our way can make us happier, and expecting a frictionless life actually causes more strife for us. Journalist Oliver Burkeman reframes challenges as the path to a more meaningful life.
OLIVER BURKEMAN: My name is Oliver Burkeman. I'm an author and a recovering productivity geek, and I wrote the book Meditations for Mortals: Four Weeks to Embrace Your Limitations and Make Time for What Counts. I think when it comes to problems — just, you know, the ordinary, annoying problems that fill so much of life — we make things a lot worse for ourselves because we have a sort of dual objection to them, right? So on the one hand, when you're dealing with a problem, there's whatever the problem is, and it's something you've got to grapple with. But there's also this background sense, a lot of the time, that we somehow shouldn't be facing problems at all. That we thought we would have got to the stage in our lives by now where we didn't have to deal with problems. That we could do our jobs really well if only there weren't all these problems. Or that family life would be so great if only we didn't have to deal with these problems. So we actually make it worse for ourselves because we're dealing both with the problem and with this sort of indignation that there should even be problems in our lives.
Develop a taste for them
I think it really helps if you can develop a taste for having problems in life. And what I mean by that is to start, really, just with the recognition that this inner demand to get to the place with no problems is sort of absurd on its face. There are definitely specific problems that one would hope to avoid, that one would never wish on anybody. But if you think about what a problem is at the most general level, it's just like some area where your limited capacities are running up against reality in some way, and as a result, there's something you have to address yourself to. Like, another word for that, or another phrase for that is "meaningful activity in life." A life without any problems, I think, would be a life that had lost what the German social theorist Hartmut Rosa calls "its resonance." There would be something very, very empty and meaningless about this sort of life with no problems.
A friend of mine describes the epiphany she had when she realized that, you know, she spent a lot of time thinking how well she could do her job if she didn't have to deal with all these problems. And then realizing that actually in a very profound sense, the problems were the job. The reason she was in that position was her creative and energetic ability to deal with unforeseen things and find resolutions to them. And apart from anything else, you know, if your job didn't feature any of those creative challenges, if it could be completely reduced to an absolutely predictable set of steps, it wouldn't be any fun. It would also be extremely prey to being automated away entirely.
Visualize first steps
So one of the things that absolutely gets in the way of our just — doing the things we think we want to do with our lives and living and working meaningfully — is avoidance. It's the sense that there are certain tasks or areas of life that trigger so much kind of fear or intimidation that we just sort of don't go there. You're worried you might not have enough money in your checking account, so you don't even check the balance. Or you're worried that some physical pain could be the sign of something serious, so you don't get it looked into. Very common and sort of very understandable human behavior to just not do things. You just ignore the garage because there's just too much junk in there, and you can't bear the thought of trying to clear it out.
There's a Dutch Zen monk called Paul Loomans who's written very eloquently on this phenomenon. And he talks about these things that we avoid all the time as "gnawing rats" that kind of, you know, in the middle of the night, you'll remember them and you'll feel bad about them. They'll be gnawing at you, but basically, you spend your life just sort of trying to get out of their way And he suggests that what we need to do is actually to sort of befriend our gnawing rats, the path towards doing something about them. And in his imagery, transforming them from gnawing rats into fluffy white sheep that just sort of very docile and don't cause the same problems.
The key step is to just sort of turn towards our gnawing rats. We need to befriend them. In other words, you just need to do something to consciously build a psychological relationship with that task. So it might not actually be that you do anything about it. If you've got a whole, like, shed full of junk that needs to be sorted out and you can't bear to go in to deal with it, it might just be a question of going into that space and sort of psychologically letting it into your world, no longer sort of actively trying to keep it an arm's length. It might be a question of just visualizing how you would undertake the first two or three steps of a big project that you've been avoiding out of fear. Could be anything like that. It could be writing down what would be involved in the initial steps.
Anything like that will have the effect of bringing that project or task or domain of life back into your sort of acknowledged reality. And then — as Loomans, argues, and it's been my experience — fairly soon after that, probably, the time will arise when it just does seem like the right moment to take the first step on that activity. But there's got to be this conscious process of kind of bringing it back, having a relationship with it — not pretending, not putting all this energy into pretending that it doesn't exist and isn't a part of your life when it already is.
Work in tiny increments
I think there are two things to remember when it comes to moving forwards with things that feel awkward because they are new and because they represent some kind of growth, something that's being challenged inside you. The first absolutely is just to remember this, right? Just to remember that the feelings of discomfort and awkwardness are not signs that something is wrong. Best, they could very well be signs that something is right. If something, some change you're making, feels uncomfortable, that's a sign that it is challenging, fairly deeply-conditioned things inside you, and you should expect it to feel awkward.
The second thing is to be willing to work in incredibly tiny increments. One question that I think could be very useful to ask yourself is just, how much of something or what version of something you're willing to do in this moment. So maybe it makes you feel awkward to put yourself into a sort of social context where you're performing, or where you're on show or something like that. And in every case it's a question of saying, "Well okay, maybe it's not speaking in front of an audience of a thousand people that I'm working to here." But sort of gradually lowering that boundary — what is it? And maybe it is some very, very small version of that activity where you will actually find once you lower, lower, lower, "Oh, okay. Yes. I could do that fifteen minutes. I could go into that setting and talk to that number of people." And it's fascinating. There almost always is some level at which you're willing to make the next step. You just have to be okay with it being a very, very, very low and introductory level, I think.
Just speaking personally, there's a sort of related phenomenon where certain kinds of advice and certain kinds of personal development philosophies make you — or I should say, make me — want to kind of cringe. They're sort of so corny, or cheesy, whatever the word you want to use. And they're sort of embarrassing. It's like, "Oh, I don't want to do that," like, "I don't want to read about self-compassion because that seems kind of like, ugh, yucky." That is a sign that you're onto something. This is something I've learned after too long in this sort of personal development space, is that feeling of, "Oh, I don't want to go there and that's not my kind of thing," is very often a defense mechanism against the fact that this material has touched something vulnerable in you. And you think that by being sort of sardonic and funny and dismissing it as cringe, you're going to protect yourself from it. So, I've reluctantly come to this conclusion, but I'm pretty confident it's the right one.
